Democracy Supporters March in Hong Kong

By KEITH BRADSHER

Published: May 31, 2004

HONG KONG, May 30—
Thousands of demonstrators marched here on Sunday afternoon to mark the coming 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown and to protest the growing restrictions on this territory's democratic development. It was the first rally in what promises to be a politically turbulent summer.

Under leaden skies and in tropical humidity, the crowd marched from a palm-fringed park to the main government offices, carrying black banners and a black coffin representing the deaths of students in Beijing on June 4, 1989. Organizers estimated the crowd at 5,600 people, while the police said ''more than 3,000'' had taken part.

The march coincided with an ongoing debate over why three prominent radio talk show hosts, all outspoken advocates of democracy, suddenly quit and left Hong Kong. The territory has been a special administrative region of China since Britain turned over the former colony in 1997.

The Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, a nonprofit group set up by prominent lawyers here, contends that Beijing officials were involved. Law Yuk-kai, the group's director, said Chinese officials had encouraged threats against two of the three, Albert Cheng and Raymond Wong, and their families by Hong Kong's triads, secret societies that dominate organized crime.

''As long as I keep my mouth shut and don't talk to you, I'm safe,'' Mr. Cheng said in a telephone interview. ''Particularly I don't talk to the foreign press.''

Mr. Wong could not be reached to comment.

Police Commissioner Dick Lee said Friday that he had no specific evidence of intimidation or threats, but that the talk show hosts' complaints were being investigated.

The third talk show host to quit, Allen Lee, recently returned to Hong Kong. He told a panel of the local legislature on Thursday that he had resigned after a former mainland official asked to speak with him about his show and said Mr. Lee's wife was very virtuous and his daughter very beautiful, comments that Mr. Lee interpreted as threats.

The official New China News Agency in Beijing said Thursday that freedom of the press was being protected in Hong Kong.

Security police in mainland China have reportedly been placing large numbers of democracy advocates under house arrest in preparation for the anniversary on Friday of the Chinese military's suppression of student demonstrations in Beijing. But The Associated Press reported the released Sunday of Li Hai, who was imprisoned for nine years after he compiled lists of people arrested in the crackdown that followed the Tiananmen Square protests.

Hundreds of police officers closed roads and provided tight security along the route of the march on Sunday. Organizers had voiced fears that Beijing's supporters might attack demonstrators.

In sharp contrast with other pro-democracy rallies over the past year, very few demonstrators brought children on Sunday. ''There were all these rumors that people might try to start trouble,'' said Sharon Chan, a 29-year-old graduate student who carried a sign that read, ''Demand accountability for June 4 massacre.''

But the march proceeded peacefully down broad avenues lined with onlookers.

Under Hong Kong law, the organizers of a march or demonstration can be sued for injuries or property damage and held personally liable. While the organizers of the march were able to obtain insurance for similar events in previous years, this year was different.

Lee Cheuk-yan, a pro-democracy lawmaker who is the vice chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China, the group here that organizes the Tiananmen Square memorial events, said the group had been denied liability insurance by 23 local insurers and 10 London-based insurers.

After the denial became a political issue here, Bernard Chan, who holds a seat in the legislature reserved for a representative of the insurance industry, ordered his own company to provide coverage for the march on Sunday and for the candlelight vigil on Friday. But Mr. Lee said he had been unable to find coverage for a much larger rally planned for July 1, the seventh anniversary of Britain's transfer of Hong Kong. The anniversary march last year drew nearly a tenth of this territory's 6.9 million people.

Triad members, known for their dexterity with meat cleavers during attacks, have had a long history of political activism here, helping Nationalists, Communists, the British and the Japanese at various times. The Japanese military allied itself with local triads when it attacked Hong Kong in 1941, hours after the assault on Pearl Harbor.

The triads were so effective as combatants that they drove British soldiers from Kowloon Peninsula to Hong Kong island with little help from the Japanese. Triad members captured British machine guns and installed them in the Kowloon Post Office to fire on the last Star Ferry evacuating the Allied forces from the peninsula, according to ''The Fall of Hong Kong,'' (Yale University Press, 2003) by Philip Snow, a prominent historian here.

While the British tried to suppress the triads, a mainland Chinese official raised eyebrows here a few years ago when he defended triads, saying some of the secret societies were ''patriotic.''

Photo: Thousands marched in Hong Kong yesterday to the territory's main government offices. (Photo by European Pressphoto Agency)